Instant Index Checking

It was annoying trying to test the index-status-checking feature before. That’s because you had to deactivate and reactivate the plugin, then wait 15 minutes for new posts to be checked.

Well, now there’s a big button at the bottom of the dashboard. When you click it, the index status of first the homepage, then some more posts will be checked.

Give it a try now. All the results are shown in the log for you to see what’s just happened.

Auto Upgrading

This is the 800lb gorilla feature of this update. Most people don’t realize, but plugins can only update in the “normal” WP way if the code is hosted on wordpress.org.

So it required custom code and a lot of testing before this was ready. For now there’s a button in your members area looking like this:

One click and it will upgrade the plugin on all your blogs. Then once we’re all confident it’s working flawlessly I’ll add a checkbox in the members area so this process will happen automatically for you.

Authority Link Improvements

There was a great suggestion to add alt and title tags to the links WPI added to your posts. So that’s now done.

Also there was a chance WPI wouldn’t create relevant auth links if the content of your post was very short (less than 100 words). Auth links are found using tags as seed keywords, and sometimes WPI (or you) would add 1 word tags. Now, when using 1 word tags to find related blogs, the topics might not 100% match up.

So as a simple fix for this, WPI will now only get auth links for your post if it can find tags that have at least 2 words. This is as close to a guarantee as there is of getting constantly related links. I’ll be keeping a close eye on this feature, so let me know if it’s not working as expected for you.

When WPI can’t add links to your post for this reason, you’ll see something like this in your log:

No 2 word tags found for post_id 33. Can’t generate auth links.

Faster Unindexed Related Posts

I noticed this on a few blogs that had 10k or more posts. What happened was WPI could take waaay too long to find related, unindexed posts, which would slow down your blog for visitors.

This is now completely fixed, and everything works lightning fast. The payoff is that when you first activate the plugin on a large blog, you might have to wait up to 10 seconds for WPI to do some donkey work.

We’re doing the heavy lifting and settings things up when you activate now, instead of on each page load.

Also where WPI added related posts to your content, it will wrap it in a div tag with the id “wpi-related”. So if you want to tweak how this displays with css, you’re free to tinker now.

Assorted Bug Fixes

I’ll rapid fire these as bullets, as they should be self evident…

Added error if WPI’s scheduled events not functioning

Improved all error messages

Added custom JSON support for servers without it

Stopped “unexpected output” appearing on the edit post dialog

Fixed foreach error on licence tab

So that’s about it for v1.1.0.

Next up is finishing off another plugin, which will be called WP SEO HQ. It’s coming along well, and I’ll update you on this blog when it’s ready. I’ve also got another 9 plugin ideas on the drawing board, so you can expect some interesting releases over the coming months.